Leslie Megahey, who has died aged 77, was a director of arts documentaries on topics throughout a large spectrum, from film legends akin to Orson Welles to JRR Tolkien and different literary greats, however his personal particular love for painters delivered to tv a string of acclaimed movie profiles.
Alongside making his personal programmes, he had spells working the BBC’s artwork sequence Area and Omnibus. When supplied the Omnibus job, he took it provided that he may make a movie based mostly on the life and work of the Seventeenth-century Dutch portrait painter Godfried Schalcken.
The end result, Schalcken the Painter (1979), made as a drama-documentary weaving truth and fiction, and based mostly on Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1839 gothic story, crammed the BBC’s conventional pre-Christmas ghost story slot. The artist (performed by Jeremy Clyde) is visited by the spectre of a misplaced love, as masochistic sexual need combines with ethical descent, Schalcken promoting out his artwork by taking commissions for purely mercenary causes. Its visually ravishing fashion, gradual tempo and spare dialogue make for compulsive viewing.
Charles Grey narrated each Schalcken the Painter and Cariani and the Courtesans (1987), which Megahey wrote and directed for the BBC’s Screenplay sequence. It tells the story of the Venetian Renaissance painter – performed by Paul McGann – who falls in love with a lady he later suspects to be a intercourse employee and thief. Once more, it was an exquisitely shot fictionalised biopic – a thriller this time – woven across the artist’s best-known works.
Away from painters, one among Megahey’s most notable items of documentary-making was The Orson Welles Story (1982), a Bafta-winning two-part programme encompassing the Hollywood large’s lengthy profession. It went from his early days presenting reside radio dramas – inflicting panic with The Conflict of the Worlds – and making the movie basic Citizen Kane, to his persevering with battles with the film institution and frustrations concerning the enterprise.
“I believe I made, primarily, a mistake staying in motion pictures,” Welles advised Megahey in a frank, in-depth interview about performing and directing. “But it surely’s the error I can’t remorse as a result of it’s like saying I shouldn’t have stayed married to that girl, however I did as a result of I really like her …
“I’ve wasted the better a part of my life searching for cash and making an attempt to get alongside, making an attempt to make my work from this terribly costly paintbox which is a film. I’ve spent an excessive amount of power on issues that don't have anything to do with making a film.”
Leslie was born in Belfast to Beatrice (nee Walton) and the Rev Thomas Megahey. When he was 5, his father grew to become minister of the Lichfield Congregational church and the household moved to Staffordshire.
At King Edward VI grammar college, Lichfield, he carried out with the dramatic society. Then, he studied English at Pembroke Faculty, Oxford, earlier than becoming a member of the BBC as a basic trainee in 1965. Inside a 12 months, he was a radio producer, first engaged on the comedy Fault on the Line with Beryl Reid and Patricia Hayes, then on a string of performs.
In 1967, he switched to tv to provide the humanities present The Look of the Week. His profession as a director started the next 12 months with a portrait of the music-hall performer Dan Leno for an additional arts programme, Contrasts.
For Tolkien in Oxford, a 1968 movie within the Launch sequence, the Lord of the Rings author gave him a uncommon interview.
Then, in 1969, Megahey contributed documentaries to Canvas, a sequence permitting David Hockney and others to provide their view on nice artworks, earlier than producing First Eleven (1970), with related private assessments. He additionally produced the 1972 sequence of Canvas and wrote and directed The Savage, a 1977 biopic of Paul Gauguin starring Leo McKern.
Present enterprise got here into Megahey’s orbit when he directed Star Shut-Up (1969), which included interviews with Lon Chaney Jr, Joan Fontaine and Mickey Rooney. Later, in 1986, the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa gave him an interview for Area.
He produced and directed Omnibus from 1972, and was govt producer of Area (1976-78) and editor of Omnibus (1978-81), later collectively enhancing each with Alan Yentob and others (1985-87), mixing excessive and low tradition in his commissions. When he began on Area, two years after its inception, with its future within the steadiness, he switched it from a magazine-style present to single movies. As BBC tv’s head of music and humanities (1988-91), as earlier than he juggled his govt place with making his personal documentaries.
Combining integrity, intelligence and sensitivity, Megahey was a mentor for a lot of different filmmakers, giving them encouragement and freedom, and solely stepping in with constructive recommendation when he felt it was wanted.
Different programmes he directed included the three-part Artists and Fashions (1986), a biopic of the Nineteenth-century French artist Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (performed by Anthony Bate), with Ian Holm narrating excerpts from the memoir of the painter’s pupil Amaury-Duval. John Russell wrote within the New York Occasions: “The programme has a magnificence and integrity of tone which can be uncommon in movies about artwork and artists.”
With Yentob, Megahey was govt producer of The RKO Story: Tales from Hollywood (1987), an exhaustive six-part historical past of the main movie studio. Megahey even directed opera, along with his movie of Béla Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Fortress (1988) successful the 1989 Prix Italia music award.
In a unique vein, he wrote and directed a BBC characteristic movie, The Hour of the Pig (1993, US title The Advocate), starring Colin Firth as a lawyer in medieval France drawn into romantic and political intrigues after leaving Paris for a life within the nation. Shortly afterwards, having left the BBC, Megahey was placed on contract to Miramax Movies, doing rewrites of half a dozen motion pictures.
One other triumph, as producer, was the three-part Leonardo (2003), a Bafta award-nominee, with Yentob exploring the lifetime of Leonardo da Vinci, performed by Mark Rylance.
He additionally wrote, with Nicol Williamson, its star, the stage play Jack: A Evening on the City, concerning the Hollywood actor John Barrymore. He directed it within the West Finish (Criterion theatre, 1994), then in Los Angeles and on Broadway two years later.
Megahey is survived by his spouse, the Czech-born documentary director Jana Boková, whom he married in 2017 after they'd been collectively for nearly 40 years.
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